Shared neural representations of cognitive conflict and negative affect in the medial frontal cortex

Vermeylen, Luc; Wisniewski, David; González-García, Carlos; Hoofs, Vincent; Notebaert, Wim; Braem, Senne

doi:10.1101/824839

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(90 reference statements)

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“…It is now well-established that cognitive conflict (e.g. incongruent Stroop stimuli, task-switching, etc) trigger negative affect (Braem et al, 2017;Dignath & Eder, 2015;Dreisbach & Fischer, 2012;Fritz & Dreisbach, 2013, 2015Schouppe et al, 2012Schouppe et al, , 2015Vermeylen, Wisniewski, et al, 2019). This result is in line with recent theories suggesting cognitive conflict is registered as an aversive event to drive cognitive control (Botvinick, 2007;Dignath et al, 2020;Dreisbach & Fischer, 2012, 2015Inzlicht et al, 2015;van Steenbergen, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict

Ivanchei¹,

Braem²,

Vermeylen³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Recent studies have demonstrated that cognitive conflict, as experienced during incongruent Stroop-trials, is automatically evaluated as negative in line with theories emphasizing the aversive nature of conflict. However, while this is well-replicated when people only see the conflict stimuli, results are mixed when participants also respond to stimuli before evaluating them. Potentially, the positive surprise people feel when overcoming the conflict, allows them to evaluate the experience as more positive. In this study, we investigated whether task experience can account for contradictory findings in the literature. Across three experiments, we observed that responding to incongruent stimuli was evaluated as negative on the first trials, but this effect disappeared after 32 trials. This contrasted with the results of a fourth experiment showing that the negative evaluation of incongruent trials did not disappear, when participants could not respond to the conflict. Finally, a reanalysis of three older experiments corroborated these results by showing that a positive evaluation of conflict only occurred after participants had some experience with the task. These results fit with the idea that we need to create outcome expectancies (lower expectancies for being correct on incongruent trials) before we can experience the resolution of conflict as positive.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict

Ivanchei¹,

Braem²,

Vermeylen³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…A compelling possibility is that the cognitive control system uses a similar representational format to coordinate multiple control signals within a task as well (Ebitz et al, 2020;Libby and Buschman, 2021;Rust and Cohen, 2022). A large body of work has shown that cognitive control networks encode multiple task parameters (Flesch et al, 2022;Freund et al, 2021;Jackson et al, 2017Jackson et al, , 2021Kayser et al, 2010b;Vermeylen et al, 2020;Woolgar et al, 2011Woolgar et al, , 2015bWoolgar et al, , 2015a, and 'global' measures of cognitive control like overall difficulty or effort (Freund et al, 2021;Kragel et al, 2018;Smith et al, 2019;Vermeylen et al, 2019). However, little is known about whether different control parameters are encoded independently from one another, which would allow the brain to simultaneously coordinate multiple forms of goaldirected task processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orthogonal neural encoding of targets and distractors supports multivariate cognitive control

Ritz

Shenhav

2022

Preprint

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People can overcome a wide array of mental challenges by coordinating their neural information processing to align with their goals. Recent behavioral work has shown that people can independently control their attention across multiple features during perceptual decision-making, but the structure of the neural representations that enables this multivariate control remains mysterious. We hypothesized that the brain solves this complex coordination problem by orthogonalizing feature-specific representations of task demands and attentional priority, allowing the brain to independently monitor and adjust multiple streams of stimulus information. To test this hypothesis, we measured fMRI activity while participants performed a task designed to tag processing and control over feature-specific information that is task-relevant (targets) versus task-irrelevant (distractors). We then characterized the geometry of these neural representations using a novel multivariate analysis (Encoding Geometry Analysis), estimating where the encoding of different task features is correlated versus orthogonal. We identified feature-specific representations of task demands and attentional priority in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS), respectively, consistent with differential roles for these regions in monitoring versus directing information processing. Representations of attentional priority in IPS were fully mediated by the control requirements of the task, associated with behavioral performance, and depended on connectivity with nodes in the frontoparietal control network, suggesting that these representations serve a fundamental role in supporting attentional control. Together, these findings provide evidence for a neural geometry that can enable coordinated control over multiple sources of information.

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“…In his 2007 update of the conflict monitoring theory, Botvinick proposed that anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) may not only monitor conflict but serve a broader function of monitoring aversive events that drive avoidance learning (Botvinick, 2007). This idea was later supported by empirical data and it is now well established that cognitive conflict (e.g., incongruent Stroop stimuli, task-switching) triggers negative affect (Braem et al, 2017;Dignath & Eder, 2015;Dreisbach & Fischer, 2012;Fritz & Dreisbach, 2013Schouppe et al, 2012Schouppe et al, , 2015Vermeylen, Wisniewski, et al, 2019). For example, using the affective priming technique (Fazio, 2001), Dreisbach and Fischer (2012) showed that participants process negative pictures faster than positive pictures, when presented immediately after incongruent Stroop stimuli (e.g., "RED" printed in blue) versus congruent Stroop stimuli ("RED" printed in red).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict

Иванчей

Braem

Vermeylen

et al. 2021

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Recent studies have demonstrated that cognitive conflict, as experienced during incongruent Stroop trials, is automatically evaluated as negative in line with theories emphasising the aversive nature of conflict. However, while this is well replicated when people only see the conflict stimuli, results are mixed when participants also respond to stimuli before evaluating them. Potentially, the positive surprise people feel when overcoming the conflict allows them to evaluate the experience as more positive. In this study, we investigated whether task experience can account for contradictory findings in the literature. Across three experiments, we observed that responding to incongruent stimuli was evaluated as negative on the first trials, but this effect disappeared after 32 trials. This contrasted with the results of a fourth experiment showing that the negative evaluation of incongruent trials did not disappear, when participants could not respond to the conflict. A re-analysis of three older experiments corroborated these results by showing that a positive evaluation of conflict only occurred after participants had some experience with the task. These results show that responding to conflict clearly changes its affective evaluation fitting with the idea that creating outcome expectancies (lower expectancies for being correct on incongruent trials) makes the experience of conflict less negative.

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Shared neural representations of cognitive conflict and negative affect in the medial frontal cortex

Cited by 7 publications

References 55 publications

Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict

Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict

Orthogonal neural encoding of targets and distractors supports multivariate cognitive control

Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict

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